This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,893 from Wednesday, 5 July 2023.
Today's show is entitled, GameCard Design Resources.
It is part of the series' tabletop gaming.
It is hosted by Clottu, and is about 38 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, how design card?
Hey everybody, this is Clottu.
Recently a friend of mine asked me on MasterDone if I had any experience with making
it, quote, game cards, like Magic of the Gathering Closed Quote.
So I've made a couple of games as a hobby.
I don't sell things in Mass.
I've never approached a game store and asked them to carry my product or anything like
that.
So I'm not really the best person to comment on this kind of stuff, I guess, other than
the fact that I've done this as a hobby, and I quite enjoy it.
So I do have thoughts about the process of making assets for games.
Now this question specifically was specified that it was going to be digital, not physical.
So it doesn't need to see print, which is good, it's a thing, it's not necessarily
good or bad, but it's a good qualifier.
So I figured in this episode I would talk about a couple of different aspects of what
one might think about if one was going to design gaming assets.
And I can kind of break it down into three major categories, which is just conceptual design
and resources, and I'll probably do it in that order.
But before I get into those thoughts, I want to kind of preface it all with setting
your own expectations or rather determining what your expectations might be.
And I think, you know, if you don't stop to think about it and you think about it and
you just ask yourself really quickly the question, what do I want to get out of this?
Then I think the natural compulsion of most people engaging in any activity is I want it
to be amazing.
That's just kind of like, since we're dreaming without any constraints, let's just
say it's going to be great.
It's going to be the greatest thing ever.
It'll be fun for me, it'll make an impact, it'll people will see it and they'll love
it, they'll want to throw money at it, I'm not even selling it, they'll still give
me a million dollars.
It's going to be the most beautiful thing, people are going to write about it in magazines,
like why not?
You can have anything at this stage.
In reality, of course, that's probably not going to happen.
I mean, I guess it happens for somebody out there, like the lottery winner of popularity,
but I mean, generally speaking, it's not going to happen, right?
So we, you have to kind of set yourself or not set expectation, but really just kind
of set your target, really, decide what it is exactly you are setting out to do.
Now, I don't have a lot of information based on just a quick master done post, like
I don't, I don't have a whole lot of background, I don't know what the real goal is.
I mean, the goal is to create some cards that look like they're for games in a digital
format.
That's all the information that I have.
I can imagine a lot of reasons someone might want to do this, might be for fun, it might
be because they want to program a video game, like a card based deck building game or
some game like that.
So there's lots of different reasons that someone might be asking about this, but I don't
know the details, and that's fine, it doesn't matter.
For you, if you're thinking about, it would be fun to make a game, those are questions
you'll have to ask yourself, what do you really want, why are you doing this?
And more importantly, I guess, there is this famous triad of features you can expect to
have when you undertake any activity.
And that triad is, you can have time, you can have quality, or you can have affordability.
What that means is that when you sit down to work on a project, you can have it done
quickly and affordably, but you're going to sacrifice on quality because you've done things
really, really fast and really, really cheap, or you could take a different tactic and
sit down to do something and really optimize on quality and on affordability.
But that's going to take you a long time, because you'll have to craft everything that
you need yourself.
And so on.
You look at the triad of time, quality, money, and you pick two, but you can't have all three.
It's a really good model to keep in mind for for anything, I think, practically, but
I mean, certainly, anything you do as a hobby, like that, that's a really, or really work
project.
It's a really good thing to keep in mind.
With that in mind, I will now talk about some of the core concepts when creating game assets.
When you're creating a game asset, it's often because you're creating a game and
interestingly, the first step in creating a game is often not creating the assets.
It's creating the mechanics, and the mechanics are purely intellectual.
There are things that you just make up in your head, and then you can even, I mean, you
shouldn't, but you, or, well, to some degree, you can, you can just kind of run them through
in your head.
You don't even need the physical objects.
So if you're thinking of a game, and you think, well, okay, so what if there was a game
where I had a game card, and who cares what it looks like, but it has the number two on
it, and then someone else has a game card, and it has the number four on it, and for
whatever reason, I think I'm going to say that two beats for in this scenario, and the
reason I'll do that is because I have another card in my hand that is an odd number.
So odd numbers give your boost if you play them to your even numbered cards, yeah, that
will work.
Okay, so that's, that's the game premise, or whatever, you know, you just come up with
the ideas, right?
And that's just happening up here in your head.
You don't have to have physical objects to represent that.
At some point, you want the physical objects to help you sort of keep it all straight,
to actually go through the motions, because I think if you keep it completely purely
mental and intellectual exercise, you tend to skip things that happen in reality.
Because it all, you're just simulating reality in your mind's eye, and so everything
tends to work really well there, because you only let the things that work into that
little simulated reality.
So if you take it out into the real world and start testing some of your thoughts, your
ideas, things tend to pop up that didn't come up in your imagination.
Now, one of the easiest ways to take a game idea into the real world are with existing
game assets.
So for instance, if you have a card deck, like some poker cards, then you could use that
to create a surprisingly complex game, and those, those cards have, if you think about
it, quite a lot of data on them.
I mean, they've, they've all got numbers, so you could use those to, to, to come up with
just arbitrary values for, for your cards, they all have a color, either red or their
black.
They all have a suit, their aces or, they're not aces, diamonds, clubs, that's what I was
thinking.
You know, spades, spades, diamonds, clubs, and whatever the other one is, clovers, something
like that.
I don't know, whatever cards are, I can't think of them right now.
But they all have that you have four suits of cards, and then possibly you have other
things as well.
And you've got certainly the face cards, right?
You've got the Joker.
Well, no, the, the jack, the king and the queen, plus you've got two jokers.
So there's a lot, there's a little bit of variety there.
You can construct a lot of game scenarios with that alone, just a normal standard 52 deck
of cards that you get out of the dollar store.
You can, you can get two decks of cards and combine them if you want, and then you have
more, more numbers than you did before, because you have duplicates.
So if, if you're finding that you need more, you just combine decks, or just scale it
down.
You, you want to simulate a hand where you have like a bunch of ones, some twos, and some,
some other, you know, threes.
Well, just, just grab those out of the deck and make a tiny little deck just for, for
a specific scenario.
So that's one really easy.
I mean, literally you can find decks of cards usually, well, usually just around, right?
If I feel like a lot of people just end up with a deck of cards on accident, if not,
go to a dollar store.
You'll get one for like literally a dollar or two dollars, whatever, whatever, the cheap amount
of money is in the US now.
Here in New Zealand, I think you could probably get a deck of cards for two bucks.
So that's one resource to keep in mind, it's a thing to keep in mind, right?
It is a resource, not for the final product, but for the process.
Another great resource during the development process is Taro, and I don't mean, like,
give yourself a Taro reading to see if you're going to be successful at game design.
I just mean, like, the Taro deck itself is a really, really useful game design tool, because
it is like a poker card deck playing card deck, except more of it.
Taro card, I think, probably partly because of its origin in, like, spiritualism and sort
of mythology, that sort of thing.
A lot of the Taro decks that you'll see, I mean, honestly, every Taro deck I've ever seen,
they're just really beautifully done.
There's a unique art on every single card.
That's like, over, I don't, I forget, it's like something like 82 cards or something
in a Taro deck or something like that.
As like, it's like a poker deck, but more of it, and unique art on every single one.
So if you're, if you're looking to come up with mechanics with game mechanics, and you can
find a great Taro decks on Etsy.com, just do a search for Taro.
You'll find a bunch of different ones, and you can purchase one of them that you like.
One of them that inspires you, or fits in with your sort of general style, and then you
can take those cards and develop all kinds of mechanics, because now you have art on every
single card, so you don't have to just limit yourself to the suits of the card.
Like, oh, is this a sword or a pentacles or a cups or a coins or whatever, ones rather?
Or, but you could also just say, like, well, all of these cards have men on them,
and all these have women on them.
So that'll be one faction, and this will be the other faction, or all of these cards
have birds on them, and these have land animals.
So those will be my two factions, or whatever.
So because of the diversity of the art and the elements on each card, it's easy to abstract
those cards as assets, and use them in the game that you're developing, that it's got a
lot more data than just a poker deck.
It's got a lot of interesting things that you could kind of latch onto, just temporarily,
and then in addition to that, I mean, they've got the numbered cards with all the suits,
the sword, dwinds, pentacles, and cups, but they also have the pentacles or coins,
but they also have the major arcana, is what it's called.
Those are kind of like the face cards, but there's a lot more of them.
So it's things like, I don't know, wheel of fortune, and the hermit, and the fool, and, you know,
the emperor, and all these sort of iconic sort of archetypes that, again, you could just use those,
as either maybe that's your game, maybe that's the structure of your game, or maybe those
with the hero cards, and all the other ones are support cards.
You can, again, the point is it's very flexible, so you can, you can bend the terror deck into
whatever you're developing, and then once you've developed everything, and it's working, and you're
having fun with this game, then you can start talking to yourself about creating the assets,
the cards themselves, the unique cards to your game, which brings me to the next segment, which is
designed. This is the actual how to part of the exercise. I mean, if you're going to make game assets,
you're going to have to touch a graphics application, and if you're not skilled at that,
if you don't like literally have the skills for that, and I'm not talking about like the comfort
and the talent. I'm talking about like you just, you never had to use a graphic application
for anything serious, then that can be a little bit difficult. My go-to graphic application is ink
scape, which is a vector-based drawing program, and that can be a little bit complex. I mean,
it's surprisingly easy to learn. Like, ink scape is shockingly, and I've heard this resounding,
I've heard resoundingly from like everyone I've ever met, like that they could, they eventually
just figure it out in scape, so it's a really, really great application. That doesn't mean
that it's quick and fast and easy to learn. It just means eventually you can learn it, so again,
affordability, quality, you can do the quality and the affordability on ink scape. It will take
time, you will have to spend a lot of time on that, but it is possible. There are templates for
cards available from thegamecrafter.com. That's THE gamecrafter the gamecrafter.com. They are a
company that specializes in producing small run games, basically print-to-order board games.
I use them all the time, they're a really great company, well, I don't know how they are as a company.
They offer a really great service, and one of the things that they offer because they print things
on demand are templates. So if you go to, well, thegamecrafter.com and look around, you'll eventually
find them, but you can go directly to s3.msonws.com slash www.thegamecrafter.com slash
templates slash bridge-card.svg and there's other other kinds, there's taro-card SVG, there's poker,
dash card, or maybe not poker, maybe poker and bridge use the same spec. I don't know, look around
in the templates, you'll find an SVG file with just like literally the page set correctly and then
little lines on the template so that you know how far it is safe for your text to go on the card.
Because on cards because they cut them off of cardboard sheets and stuff, you're likely to
accidentally get like the last half part of your word chopped off if you go straight up to the edge.
So there are, there's a text safe zone that this template provides. Now if you're not printing,
then you don't need to worry about that and you can just, you can do whatever you want. I would still,
I would never say never, and even though you're telling yourself, I'm going to do a digital
today, you never know, maybe it would be useful to have print safe materials. But anyway,
there's a template, there's not a whole lot to it. But if you don't know ink escape, if you don't
know what an SVG is or you don't want to know, then there's another option, and this is not a
bad option, and I used to never recommend this option. In fact, I would recommend actively against
this option. And I don't know, then I just kind of started using the thing at work, and I realized
it's kind of amazing. Libre office draw. So Libre office, the open source office application
has a, has the usual word processor, spreadsheet component. It's got like a presentation component,
so on. But one of the things that it also has is a application called draw, DRAW, and it is a,
it is an art, or a layout program, really. I wouldn't call it an art program. It's more like a
graphic layout program, and you could use that to create cards with, you, the process is simple.
You open up Libre office draw. You go to page, page properties, and set the size of your of the page
to 57 millimeters by 89 millimeters for a bridge card. You can look up the sizes of other cards,
but bridge, or I keep going back to bridge because that's, I'm pretty darn sure, that's the size
of, uh, magic, the gathering. So, or it's going to be approximately that big. Uh, so 57 by 89,
if 57 millimeters by 89 millimeters is the, the card size, that's 2.25 by 3.5 inches. You set your
page size to that, and now you have a card. You are looking at a digital card. It is blank right now.
And so then the process is to just start layering things onto it. So you go get some artwork.
We'll get to that in the resources section. You go get some artwork. You import it into, you know,
you insert the image onto the card, and then maybe you put a little, um, box over, over the,
the image, and in the box, you put some text like the name of the card. This is a nightin shining
armor. This is a space wizard. This is a princess. This is an, uh, an orc, an ogre, you know,
you just label the card, and then you give it some value. So you want your orcs to hit hard, but to
be less resilient, maybe, because they're not, they're not wearing armor. So you maybe give them,
I don't know, four strength and, uh, two toughness. The nightin shining armor is, uh, well
armored, so maybe he has a four toughness, and, uh, maybe a three strength, because he's not, he's just
a human after all, uh, and so on. So you, you put in numbers. You put in names and, and, you know,
all the information that you want, you write that on the card. Now if your text is sort of getting
up by your artwork, then yeah, you can, you can put in some, some background colors, just put
a, you know, fill the, the text box in with, with some solid color, modern design, sensibility,
tends to stay away from like gradients and things like that. So I would just use a flat design,
just use solid colors, some text, and some artwork. Next thing, you know, you've got a card.
Okay. So that's LibreOffice Draw. You can export your, each card that you make, you make one card
per page, and then you just export your entire document, uh, as a series of PNGs or JPEGs or whatever,
and, or at PDF, you know, whatever you need it as, and then now you've got digital cards.
You might want to design a card back as well if you're programming a game where people need to
see the, the back of the card. But of course, the, the back when you're programming the back doesn't
actually have to be, well, it isn't. It's not part of that same file. I mean, it could be,
you could do a sprite layout or something. But I mean, the, the back doesn't have to like literally
be the back of the card, right? It's just a card. It's a graphic representing the back of the card,
and you put that on your deck, and then when someone quote unquote draws it, you move, you know,
you, you just make a new image of the, of the face up card. So it's, it's not, it's not really
literally married to that file. If you're printing, uh, the standard, you know, you're, you're
going to have like all the fronts of your cards on a page, and then you're going to have another
page with just the backs, and then you're going to send that to the printer, and you'll identify
one as the front, one as the back, and they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll make sure that the, you know,
that their printers are printing, one back on each sheet to one front on each sheet. And that's the
design process. It's not really that hard. Um, I will say that one virtuous way of design thinking
is minimalism. So minimalism is a powerful, powerful tool for the, um, unskilled graphic, or unskilled
artist rather. I, I feel like the graphic design is one thing, but like the art is another, and
and I'll, I'll talk about some sources of artwork in resources, which is the next section,
but for now, let's just assume that art is hard to get, right? Like really good art that's consistent
across a whole series of cards, that's, that's tough. Minimalism is your friend, and very frequently
for, for lots of reason. It's minimalism is your friend, because it, it, it costs less time.
It might cost upfront time to like come up with a design that you like, without looking so
basic that it makes you just embarrassed, or it makes you not even think that it's a game asset,
but generally, once you establish the pattern, if it is minimalism, then it's not going to take
that much time. It's not going to take, you can get a high quality with minimalism, because
it's minimal. There's just not that many components to worry about. So the things that you do
have to create, end up being high quality, because there were only a few of them. And you can also,
it's quite affordable for minimalism, because if you just issue the idea that you're going to just
that you, that you could spend thousands of dollars on custom artwork, and decide I'm just going to
use letters or public domain art. Suddenly, you've gotten a cheap, cheap card that looks
great in some time. Okay, so minimalism is important, and like to illustrate sort of the concept here,
let's assume that you've got this great idea for a game asset, and in your mind's eye,
because in your mind's eye, everything is amazing and perfect and wonderful and groundbreaking.
In your mind's eye, you've got this card, and there's the space wizard with laser sword on the
deck of a space station, and he looks amazing, and you can just see it vividly in your mind, and
there's probably some writing on there, and some iconography to indicate his physical prowess,
as well as his psychic strength, all the different things that space wizards have. And you're
really excited about this, and then you realize one day that you don't have any artwork of a space
wizard, and even if you tried to describe what you saw to an artist, you're not sure that you
would confidently know what to describe. Like how would you, how do you get the art, how do you
describe it, someone get the exact same thing? So you decide, I'm going to go minimal. So instead of
having a card with a space wizard, and the laser sword, and all the icons, and all these things,
you decide you're going to grab a picture of a sword. You're going to give it a glow effect in
Gimp. You're going to make it neon, and then you're going to put it on a black background.
Now, doesn't that look snazzy? Of course it does. Black is the new black. You've got this cool
look and sword that's glowing. So now, hey, it's a laser sword, even though it looks like a medieval
sword from a free public domain website. There it is. It looks great. And people will look at
that, and they'll think, wow, that is so stylish. Like the designer was so bold in choosing
this particular sword because, because so many reasons, like obviously this is a reference to
Alexander the Great's famous dream of the glowing sword that he had before he went and
defeated the whoever he defeated. You know, and though it will become its own thing,
whether you want it to or not. Like, minimalism, that's the power of minimalism. Well,
one of the many powers of minimalism is that it inspires other people to fill in the blanks.
That you couldn't be bothered to be explicit about. So you do that and that's a lot easier to
design than coming up with like the space wizard art that you don't have and then finding room for
all your icons and numbers and all the important data that you have that you just knew that had
to be on the card somewhere. But now you've got artwork and you can't see the data. And so you
know, you have to kind of move things around. Believe me, minimalism, black background,
glowing sword, put a bunch of numbers down the side. You're done. Maybe grab a couple of
emojis, you know, like a shield emoji and a crossed sword emoji to represent like the physical
prowess and the defense and then something else like little brain wave icons like an RSS feed icon
for the psychic power, you know, little little icons down the side with some numbers by them.
You're done. You've just designed a card. Do that 50 other times and you've got a whole deck of cards.
That are ready to go to battle or whatever. So minimalism is an important, important concept
when you're home brewing your own game assets. Really embrace it, try to make it, try to get
comfortable with it because it just saves so much in every respect. Okay. So new section resources.
This is unfortunately the most poultry section I have. I have lots of thoughts about design and
various, you know, getting started, getting started concepts. Resources, I don't have that many of
at least I don't have that many that are really, really useful. So I do have some that are very useful.
But I don't have as many as I would like. So first of all, if we are embracing minimalism,
you may as well go embrace free SVG. Really, it is a mess of just random public domain art or
public domain slash creative commons zero artwork. It is stuff that people have scanned in from
1940s comics. It is stuff that people have drawn themselves in in third grade. It is this,
it's all kinds of stuff and there's a lot of it. Remember, I said you could have quality,
you could have affordability, but you could have time. Well, free SVG is your time sync. You will
spend all of your time looking through SVG for work that is consistent enough to look like that
to look like it came from the same game. And also, that's, you know, kind of high quality enough.
That works with your game, I guess, is really what I mean. Because the quality is the quality. Once
you find your the common thread, that's the quality you're using, right? Because you just have to
make sure that the images look like they all came from the same game. So if they look one way,
then that's what you got. So you grab a bunch of free SVGs from free SVG.org, download them,
you put them on cards, you've got your game. That's, that's one way of doing it. Now, like I say,
you're going to take a lot of time doing that. I made a game called Dark Occult, which was a
re revival of an old Kenneth ramen card game from like the 80s called Dark Colts. And because
the original game art was copyright and I couldn't get in touch with Kenneth ramen, I did try.
I just went to free SVG and pulled a bunch of artwork. And it was all stuff that was like, yeah,
literally scanned in from, you know, random sources, like mostly, like, I think comic books from
the 40s and 50s, like horror comic books. Like, I can't think of any of the names all of the sudden.
I literally own several of them. So I don't know why I can't think of their names anyway. They're
old. They're horror comic books. And they're great. And they're super cheesy. And they're wonderful.
But I managed to grab, like, some artwork that felt kind of atmospheric to me. And I put them on
white cards, black ink, put the original text, or callouts to the original text on the bottom of
the card. And that was it. Like, that was, I was done. I made the card game. It's done. I play it all the
time. I love it. It's literally one of my favorite games. I mean, I'm not taking credit for the game
design. I didn't make the game. I just, I just re-implemented the cards. And it's all from
freesvg.org. That used to be openclipart.org. By the way, freesvg is sort of the successor of open
clipart. Open clipart went wonky. So freesvg.org is a great resource for, you know, if you're
ready to embrace minimalism. And if you have no expectation in terms of, like, the artwork that
you're going to find. Like, if you're looking for something specific, you're not going to find it
on freesvg. Freesvg is about diving into a pool of lots and lots of stuff and just rummaging,
rummaging through it all. Okay. So that's freesvg.org. Another one, just as great, just as bad.
Opengameart.org. Opengameart.org is very, very geared toward video games. And you have the same
problem. It's just a bunch of random stuff made by random people for random reasons. And for
whatever reason they ended up putting it at opengameart.org. For anyone to use, that's great
except that you can't find anything consistent. You will find a great looking sword icon that you
will, you'll think this will be perfect for my digital card game. And then you'll think all I need
now is a treasure chest. That'll be easy. And you'll go and look for a treasure chest and you won't
be able to find one except that one that's like eight pixels by eight pixels because someone
developed it 10 years ago for a Nintendo Gameboy mod that they're doing. You won't find anything
consistent. And then so you'll have to what you'll end up having to do is find all of the artwork
within the realm of what you're looking for. And then you'll have to find the common thread. And that
will be the look of your game. You didn't imagine your game to be a pixel art dungeon crawler.
Well, now it's a pixel art dungeon crawler because that's the art you could find. It works.
It's just not, you feel the compromise as you're making it. That said, it can work really well.
I made a game, a little card game. And I used, I think eight different artworks from opengame.org.
And it worked brilliantly. It was really nice. It had a little bit of fantasy, a little bit of sci-fi.
It was just kind of one of those worlds where it was like, yeah, we got both. We got cables and computers.
And we got wizards doing scroll spells. You know, it's fine. You just have to, you know,
the look and feel of your game gets determined for you. And then I got two other resources that I think
could, could actually be useful. Like these are, these are pretty good. Archmage is a open-source
card game that is Archmage, ARC in a GE. You can find it at archmage.org. Now they, it's an amazing
project. They're working really hard at making a trading card game that is open-source. So think
magic of magic, the gathering, or I guess probably like, you geo or Pokemon or something like that.
But, but it's open-source. It's sort of a low fantasy setting. And it's an attack,
your opponent kind of card game where you build up a little army in your deck. And you figure out
what attacks what and so on. So it's, it's a really, really, very cool little card game.
I have two boxes of it. I ordered them and had them shipped all the way to New Zealand,
which was not cheap. But I really, really wanted to support the project. And it's just a really,
really, it's really cool. It is a neat project. I'm really super glad to have two card sets from it.
And, you know, you look at it and you're just thinking, well, this is open-source. Like, where do
it, where do they source their art? And they source their art from lots of different places. But they
do it in such a way that it mostly looks consistent. And it is all open-source artwork. So you could
borrow the artwork for your own game assets, archmaj.org. Some of it comes from battle for West
North, the strategy video game. Others, other things, they've just obtained permission to use it
under Creative Commons license. I think some is probably drawn specifically for the game. It's just,
it's a lot of art assets that you could feasibly use. Go to archmaj.org slash artwork.
And you'll find all of the images that they have, or you'll find a link rather to the image,
that all the images that they have. And there's, you know, there's, it's a mix. It's like low
fantasy. So there's some sort of things that would be suggestive of like wizardry and fairies and
things like that. But there's a lot of just sort of generic medieval stuff as well. But it's
mostly consistent in look. But I mean, it is a certain look, right? I mean, it, again,
you're, there's a compromise being made here. You're saying, okay, well, I'm going to use art
that looks like this. But I mean, that's without, without commissioning art, like that's a compromise
that you're going to be making. The other resource with art pre-existing is my own game on
get lab.com slash not plateau slash petition dash card game. That's petition PET, IT, IO in dash card
dash game on get lab.com slash not plateau. This is a card game that I developed a couple of years ago
and commissioned artwork for and then released to the art into creative commons. So, and it was all
done with open source software, creta, specifically. So, it's a bunch of art. I mean, it's a bunch
of medieval looking people, a couple of fantasy-ish, like there's like sort of a goblin slash,
I don't know what it would really work maybe, or really a goblin. I think there's a swamp creature,
you know, there's, there's like some things that are like, oh, that's fantasy. But mostly,
it's, again, low fantasy, like a lot of medieval type of stuff, not very dynamic. I realized
well after commissioning the art that as an art, the art ordering itself is a, is a skill
and you don't really think about that. But being able to describe, again, kind of like a dynamic
pose and making sure that your cards have action oriented things happening on them rather than just,
just they just all look like portraits. That's, that's a skill that I didn't have at the time.
So, if I ever get to order art again, then I'll be sure to be a little bit more dynamic about my art
orders. Well, no, and actually, you know what? I have ordered art since then, and I did. I,
I learned to my lesson. I had a lot more dynamic poses later on, but those weren't for cards.
Those were for, like, books and things. So anyway, that's something that's free to use as well
and creative commons, get lab.com slash, not cloud two slash petition, dash card, dash game. And those,
so arcmage and petition are the kind of the two sources of like, here's a bunch of consistent art,
both happen to be low fantasy. You could feasibly use them. They exist. And then after that,
there's just little long shots. There's artstation.com, there's deviantart.com,
both of those specialize in giving sort of a home to artists, but there's really not a huge
culture of like creative commons. I mean, artstation, I think, even less. So, like, I don't even know
if there are creative commons assets on there at all. That's not true. I know that there are some.
Not a lot, though. deviantart.com, I feel has gotten less focused on creative commons over the years.
I could be making that up. That's just my impression. There's a lot of stuff on there. And so once
again, you're just going to have you, you would just be looking through a bunch of things,
hoping to find something that looks vaguely similar enough to something else to think, yeah,
this could come from the same game. Yeah, sure. That'll work. It's difficult. The other like obvious
option, possibly, is, you know, any of the online art generation things that are happening right
now, like what is mid-journey or something like that. Like, I've seen several books lately that
have come out for role-playing. And they just say, right on the book, this book contains
artwork generated by AI. And that's, that's their art credit. You know, and I don't know. Like,
that seems like it's going to be, that's definitely a developing thing, right? I mean, like,
is that a real option for what you're doing? I don't know. Like, it is something that might
be an option. It may not be. And I don't think, like, I think the really good renders, I think
are going to cost money. I don't think they're going to be the ones that you just type into a search
engine, you know, how, how I make free art with AI. Like, I think, so I think there's going to
still be a cost associated with that. And then there's, there's the whole question of, like,
well, if I'm going to an AI for art, am I robbing an artist of a paycheck or something? And I don't
know, are you? I mean, like, how much would you pay an artist if you weren't paying an AI? Probably,
you're, you know, I don't know. You'd have to look at the cost of benefit analysis and then
whether you want to support a computer or support a person. It's a, it's a big question mark.
Nobody knows how this works yet. I don't think. So, I mean, people know how things work. I'm
saying, I don't know that anybody's really comfortable with, like, sort of how we're all,
like, what, what is this market? Like, what, what is this exactly? Where the AI isn't obviously
generating art just from its own imagination, because it doesn't have an imagination to computer.
So, it's, it's, it's basing it off of artwork online. How do you feel about that and so on? So,
lots of big philosophical questions there. And then you have to temper those philosophical
questions with, like, the reality of, like, well, look, all I want to do is make a cool,
looking artwork card. Like, that's, that's my goal. Like, what, how am I going to do that?
I don't know. I, I have only commissioned artists who use open source tooling and who are
willing to release into creative comments. That's, that's the line that I've drawn so far,
but they're hard to find. It's like, really hard to find as someone who specifically uses open source
tooling and is willing to release into creative comments. Like, those are just, sometimes you can find
one, not the other. Sometimes you can't find either. And then you have to pay, you know,
like, and you're not making any money off of the thing, probably. It's, it's tough. It is tough.
I mean, it's no, it's no tougher than it's ever been. Like, these are all questions that
creators, content creators, have asked themselves since forever. It's just the specifics are a
little bit different. So, I don't know. Hopefully, some of that is useful. There, it meets the brief.
And the brief was, do you have thoughts about creating game assets? I did. I have provided them here.
Hopefully, they were useful or insightful or informative, or made for a good half hour of listening.
Why don't you record a show about something that you're interested in? Thanks for listening.
Talk to you next time.
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